Sunday, November 6, 2016

CURMUDGUCATION: Digital Natives Are Lost

I have had this conversation a thousand thousand times with people of my own generation, people who don't actually work with students. They will be going on about their own computer illiteracy and waxing rhapsodic about the super-duper skills of the young generation, the digital natives.

"You don't understand," I'll tell them. "The vast majority of my students don't know jack about modern technology. They know how to operate one or two apps that they use regularly. Beyond that, they are as lost as their own grandparents."

And now there is research to back me up.

At EdWeek, Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew report on their own research at Stanford as well as research by folks at Northwestern. In the Northwestern study, college students turned out to believe that Google lists links in the order of accuracy and trustworthiness-- good news for all those people making a living optimizing websites for search ranking, and bad news for everyone wishes people would stop using the internet CURMUDGUCATION: Digital Natives Are Lost: